Even as it takes fire over its $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra, the Energy Department intends to keep pushing billions of dollars in additional guarantees in the next week and a half.

For the department, it’s a matter of bad timing: Last month’s collapse of Solyndra has thrown a cloud of suspicion over the entire clean-energy loan guarantee program, just as DOE nears a Sept. 30 deadline to close on $9.3 billion in pending applications.

Some Republicans have accused DOE of slapping together the remaining guarantees to beat the clock.

"With $10 billion still on the shelf, the last thing we can afford from the Obama administration are more of the same sloppy, poor investments in the final rush to get the cash out the door," Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), oversight chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a statement.

“I see no reason for the taxpayers to have any confidence that these funds could be spent wisely,” Stearns said, adding that the unspent money “should be returned to the Treasury to reduce our debt.”

Last week, Stearns called on Loan Programs Office Executive Director Jonathan Silver to resign over the Solyndra affair.

Yet supporters of the program argue that a lot of time and money is at stake if the department fails to meet the Sept. 30 deadline, when its congressional authority expires.

DOE faces a dilemma: Continue finalizing projects and endure more GOP fury about potentially putting taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars. Or terminate the pending applications, leaving the companies and their projects out in the cold.

More than a dozen energy projects that were offered conditional commitments by the DOE Loan Programs Office still need to be finalized by Sept. 30. DOE doesn’t actually lend the money, but the guarantees help the companies get financing elsewhere by promising that taxpayers will make up the loss if a project fails.

The Sept. 30 deadline was written into the 2009 stimulus law, making it no surprise to anyone who has been following the program.

The department expressed concern about the deadline in May, when it had about one-third of its clean-energy loan guarantee funding left to be committed. The loan office then streamlined its applicant pool by freezing most of the pending applications to focus on those with the best chance of being completed by Sept. 30.

At the time, Silver wouldn't say exactly how many projects were being put on hold but said they numbered in the "several dozens."

"Given the amount of remaining available funding and the closing day and the requirements applicants have to meet, obviously not all the projects in the pipeline can get done," Silver said in an interview with POLITICO.

To qualify for the program, projects must finalize their loan guarantee agreements with the government and break ground on construction before the end of September.

“These guarantees have to be done by Sept. 30, and if they’re not done by then you can’t just do them the next week,” said Richard Caperton, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning advocacy group.

Caperton also argued that shutting down the program would scare off future applicants, regardless of the finer points surrounding the Solyndra affair. “I think it would send the message that the government is not a trustworthy business partner,” he said.

DOE has not indicated that it intends to hold up any of the pending applications.

“We are committed to ensuring that every deal closed before Sept. 30 is fully vetted and will not close any deal that has not received full due diligence by Sept. 30,” DOE spokesman Damien LaVera said in an email.

He added: “We are not rushing to complete deals, we are using the full amount of time Congress allocated for the program so we can ensure that we fully complete all due diligence and make informed decisions based on the most recent data. Every agreement in our portfolio has undergone many months of extensive review and evaluation before a conditional commitment is signed.”

Earlier this year, congressional Republicans’ attacks on the 2009 stimulus included the accusation that DOE’s loan office was foot-dragging with its financial support for clean energy projects. House members inserted language into never-enacted budget legislation in February that would have revoked any unused loan authority for non-nuclear power projects.

But the loan office was largely left intact in the April budget agreement that funded the federal government for the rest of fiscal year 2011. The loan guarantee program has also received support from both the House and Senate spending bills for FY 2012.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 4:35 p.m. on September 19, 2011.